THE STATE OF THE DEAD.
Among all the problems with which man has busied himself, none so
appeals to his hopes and fears as that of the future life. Is there a
farther shore, and if so, shall we reach it? Few races, if any, have
doubted the existence of a future state, but their conceptions of it
have differed greatly. But of all the races of antiquity, outside Egypt,
the Celts seem to have cherished the most ardent belief in the world
beyond the grave, and to have been preoccupied with its joys. Their
belief, so far as we know it, was extremely vivid, and its chief
characteristic was life in the body after death, in another
region.[1154] This, coupled with the fact that it was taught as a
doctrine by the Druids, made it the admiration of classical onlookers.
But besides this belief there was another, derived from the ideas of a
distant past, that the dead lived on in the grave--the two conceptions
being connected. And there may also have been a certain degree of belief
in transmigration. Although the Celts believed that the soul could exist
apart from the body, there seems to be no evidence that they believed in
a future existence of the soul as a shade. This belief is certainly
found in some late Welsh poems, where the ghosts are described as
wandering in the Caledonian forest, but these can hardly be made use of
as evidence for the old pagan doctrine. The evidence for the latter may
be gathered from classical observers, from archæology and from Irish
texts.
Cæsar writes: "The Druids in particular wish to impress this on them
that souls do not perish, but pass from one to another (_ab aliis ... ad
alios_) after death, and by this chiefly they think to incite men to
valour, the fear of death being overlooked." Later he adds, that at
funerals all things which had been dear to the dead man, even living
creatures, were thrown on the funeral pyre, and shortly before his time
slaves and beloved clients were also consumed.[1155] Diodorus says:
"Among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevailed that the souls of men
were immortal, and after completing their term of existence they live
again, the soul passing into another body. Hence at the burial of the
dead some threw letters addressed to dead relatives on the funeral pile,
believing that the dead would read them in the next world."[1156]
Valerius Maximus writes: "They would fain make us believe that the souls
of men are immortal. I would be tempted to call these breeches-wearing
folk fools, if their doctrine were not the same as that of the
mantle-clad Pythagoras." He also speaks of money lent which would be
repaid in the next world, because men's souls are immortal.[1157] These
passages are generally taken to mean that the Celts believed simply in
transmigration of the Pythagorean type. Possibly all these writers cite
one common original, but Cæsar makes no reference to Pythagoras. A
comparison with the Pythagorean doctrine shows that the Celtic belief
differed materially from it. According to the former, men's souls
entered new bodies, even those of animals, in this world, and as an
expiation. There is nothing of this in the Celtic doctrine. The new body
is not a prison-house of the soul in which it must expiate its former
sins, and the soul receives it not in this world but in another. The
real point of connection was the insistence of both upon immortality,
the Druids teaching that it was bodily immortality. Their doctrine no
more taught transmigration than does the Christian doctrine of the
resurrection. Roman writers, aware that Pythagoras taught immortality
_via_ a series of transmigrations, and that the Druids taught a doctrine
of bodily immortality, may have thought that the receiving of a new body
meant transmigration. Themselves sceptical of a future life or believing
in a traditional gloomy Hades, they were bound to be struck with the
vigour of the Celtic doctrine and its effects upon conduct. The only
thing like it of which they knew was the Pythagorean doctrine. Looked at
in this light, Cæsar's words need not convey the idea of transmigration,
and it is possible that he mistranslated some Greek original. Had these
writers meant that the Druids taught transmigration, they could hardly
have added the passages regarding debts being paid in the other world,
or letters conveyed there by the dead, or human sacrifices to benefit
the dead there. These also preclude the idea of a mere immortality of
the soul. The dead Celt continued to be the person he had been, and it
may have been that not a new body, but the old body glorified, was
tenanted by his soul beyond the grave. This bodily immortality in a
region where life went on as on this earth, but under happier
conditions, would then be like the Vedic teaching that the soul, after
the burning of the body, went to the heaven of Yama, and there received
its body complete and glorified. The two conceptions, Hindu and Celtic,
may have sprung from early "Aryan" belief.
This Celtic doctrine appears more clearly from what Lucan says of the
Druidic teaching. "From you we learn that the bourne of man's existence
is not the silent halls of Erebus, in another world (or region, _in orbe
alio_) the spirit animates the members. Death, if your lore be true, is
but the centre of a long life." For this reason, he adds, the Celtic
warrior had no fear of death.[1158] Thus Lucan conceived the Druidic
doctrine to be one of bodily immortality in another region. That region
was not a gloomy state; rather it resembled the Egyptian Aalu with its
rich and varied existence. Classical writers, of course, may have known
of what appears to have been a sporadic Celtic idea, derived from old
beliefs, that the soul might take the form of an animal, but this was
not the Druidic teaching. Again, if the Gauls, like the Irish, had myths
telling of the rebirth of gods or semi-divine beings, these may have
been misinterpreted by those writers and regarded as eschatological. But
such myths do not concern mortals. Other writers, Timagenes, Strabo, and
Mela,[1159] speak only of the immortality of the soul, but their
testimony is probably not at variance with that of Lucan, since Mela
appears to copy Cæsar, and speaks of accounts and debts being passed on
to the next world.
This theory of a bodily immortality is supported by the Irish sagas, in
which ghosts, in our sense of the word, do not exist. The dead who
return are not spectres, but are fully clothed upon with a body. Thus,
when Cúchulainn returns at the command of S. Patrick, he is described
exactly as if he were still in the flesh. "His hair was thick and black
... in his head his eye gleamed swift and grey.... Blacker than the side
of a cooking spit each of his two brows, redder than ruby his lips." His
clothes and weapons are fully described, while his chariot and horses
are equally corporeal.[1160] Similar descriptions of the dead who return
are not infrequent, e.g. that of Caoilte in the story of Mongan, whom
every one believes to be a living warrior, and that of Fergus mac Roich,
who reappeared in a beautiful form, adorned with brown hair and clad in
his former splendour, and recited the lost story of the _Táin_.[1161]
Thus the Irish Celts believed that in another world the spirit animated
the members. This bodily existence is also suggested in Celtic versions
of the "Dead Debtor" folk-tale cycle. Generally an animal in whose shape
a dead man helps his benefactor is found in other European versions, but
in the Celtic stories not an animal but the dead man himself appears as
a living person in corporeal form.[1162] Equally substantial and
corporeal, eating, drinking, lovemaking, and fighting are the divine
folk of the _síd_ or of Elysium, or the gods as they are represented in
the texts. To the Celts, gods, _síde_, and the dead, all alike had a
bodily form, which, however, might become invisible, and in other ways
differed from the earthly body.
The archæological evidence of burial customs among the Celts also bears
witness to this belief. Over the whole Celtic area a rich profusion of
grave-goods has been found, consisting of weapons, armour, chariots,
utensils, ornaments, and coins.[1163] Some of the interments undoubtedly
point to sacrifice of wife, children, or slaves at the grave. Male and
female skeletons are often in close proximity, in one case the arm of
the male encircling the neck of the female. In other cases the remains
of children are found with these. Or while the lower interment is richly
provided with grave-goods, above it lie irregularly several skeletons,
without grave-goods, and often with head separated from the body,
pointing to decapitation, while in one case the arms had been tied
behind the back.[1164] All this suggests, taken in connection with
classical evidence regarding burial customs, that the future life was
life in the body, and that it was a _replica_ of this life, with the
same affections, needs, and energies. Certain passages in Irish texts
also describe burials, and tell how the dead were interred with
ornaments and weapons, while it was a common custom to bury the dead
warrior in his armour, fully armed, and facing the region whence enemies
might be expected. Thus he was a perpetual menace to them and prevented
their attack.[1165] Possibly this belief may account for the elevated
position of many tumuli. Animals were also sacrificed. Hostages were
buried alive with Fiachra, according to one text, and the wives of
heroes sometimes express their desire to be buried along with their dead
husbands.[1166]
The idea that the body as well as the soul was immortal was probably
linked on to a very primitive belief regarding the dead, and one shared
by many peoples, that they lived on in the grave. This conception was
never forgotten, even in regions where the theory of a distant land of
the dead was evolved, or where the body was consumed by fire before
burial. It appears from such practices as binding the dead with cords,
or laying heavy stones or a mound of earth on the grave, probably to
prevent their egress, or feeding the dead with sacrificial food at the
grave, or from the belief that the dead come forth not as spirits, but
in the body from the grave. This primitive conception, of which the
belief in a subterranean world of the dead is an extension, long
survived among various races, e.g. the Scandinavians, who believed in
the barrow as the abiding place of the dead, while they also had their
conception of Hel and Valhalla, or among the Slavs, side by side with
Christian conceptions.[1167] It also survived among the Celts, though
another belief in the _orbis alius_ had arisen. This can be shown from
modern and ancient folk-belief and custom.
In numerous Celtic folk-tales the dead rise in the body, not as ghosts,
from the grave, which is sometimes described as a house in which they
live. They perform their ordinary occupations in house or field; they
eat with the living, or avenge themselves upon them; if scourged, blood
is drawn from their bodies; and, in one curious Breton tale, a dead
husband visits his wife in bed and she then has a child by him, because,
as he said, "sa compte d'enfants" was not yet complete.[1168] In other
stories a corpse becomes animated and speaks or acts in presence of the
living, or from the tomb itself when it is disturbed.[1169] The earliest
literary example of such a tale is the tenth century "Adventures of
Nera," based on older sources. In this Nera goes to tie a withy to the
foot of a man who has been hung. The corpse begs a drink, and then
forces Nera to carry him to a house, where he kills two sleepers.[1170]
All such stories, showing as they do that a corpse is really living,
must in essence be of great antiquity. Another common belief, found over
the Celtic area, is that the dead rise from the grave, not as ghosts,
when they will, and that they appear _en masse_ on the night of All
Saints, and join the living.[1171]
As a result of such beliefs, various customs are found in use,
apparently to permit of the corpse having freedom of movement, contrary
to the older custom of preventing its egress from the grave. In the west
of Ireland the feet of the corpse are left free, and the nails are drawn
from the coffin at the grave. In the Hebrides the threads of the shroud
are cut or the bindings of feet, hands, and face are raised when the
body is placed in the coffin, and in Brittany the arms and feet are left
free when the corpse is dressed.[1172] The reason is said to be that the
spirit may have less trouble in getting to the spirit world, but it is
obvious that a more material view preceded and still underlies this
later gloss. Many stories are told illustrating these customs, and the
earlier belief, Christianised, appears in the tale of a woman who
haunted her friends because they had made her grave-clothes so short
that the fires of Purgatory burnt her knees.[1173]
Earlier customs recorded among the Celts also point to the existence of
this primitive belief influencing actual custom. Nicander says that the
Celts went by night to the tombs of great men to obtain oracles, so much
did they believe that they were still living there.[1174] In Ireland,
oracles were also sought by sleeping on funeral cairns, and it was to
the grave of Fergus that two bards resorted in order to obtain from him
the lost story of the _Táin_. We have also seen how, in Ireland, armed
heroes exerted a sinister influence upon enemies from their graves,
which may thus have been regarded as their homes--a belief also
underlying the Welsh story of Bran's head.
Where was the world of the dead situated? M. Reinach has shown, by a
careful comparison of the different uses of the word _orbis_, that
Lucan's words do not necessarily mean "another world," but "another
region," i.e. of this world.[1175] If the Celts cherished so firmly the
belief that the dead lived on in the grave, a belief in an underworld of
the dead was bound in course of time to have been evolved as part of
their creed. To it all graves and tumuli would give access. Classical
observers apparently held that the Celtic future state was like their
own in being an underworld region, since they speak of the dead Celts as
_inferi_, or as going _ad Manes_, and Plutarch makes Camma speak of
descending to her dead husband.[1176] What differentiated it from their
own gloomy underworld was its exuberant life and immortality. This
aspect of a subterranean land presented no difficulty to the Celt, who
had many tales of an underworld or under-water region more beautiful and
blissful than anything on earth. Such a subterranean world must have
been that of the Celtic Dispater, a god of fertility and growth, the
roots of things being nourished from his kingdom. From him men had
descended,[1177] probably a myth of their coming forth from his
subterranean kingdom, and to him they returned after death to a blissful
life.
Several writers, notably M. D'Arbois, assume that the _orbis alius_ of
the dead was the Celtic island Elysium. But that Elysium _never_ appears
in the tales as a land of the dead. It is a land of gods and deathless
folk who are not those who have passed from this world by death. Mortals
may reach it by favour, but only while still in life. It might be argued
that Elysium was regarded in pagan times as the land of the dead, but
after Christian eschatological views prevailed, it became a kind of
fairyland. But the existing tales give no hint of this, and, after being
carefully examined, they show that Elysium had always been a place
distinct from that of the departed, though there may have arisen a
tendency to confuse the two.
If there was a genuine Celtic belief in an island of the dead, it could
have been no more than a local one, else Cæsar would not have spoken as
he does of the Celtic Dispater. Such a local belief now exists on the
Breton coast, but it is mainly concerned with the souls of the
drowned.[1178] A similar local belief may explain the story told by
Procopius, who says that Brittia (Britain), an island lying off the
mouth of the Rhine, is divided from north to south by a wall beyond
which is a noxious region. This is a distorted reminiscence of the Roman
wall, which would appear to run in this direction if Ptolemy's map, in
which Scotland lies at right angles to England, had been consulted.
Thither fishermen from the opposite coast are compelled to ferry over at
dead of night the shades of the dead, unseen to them, but marshalled by
a mysterious leader.[1179] Procopius may have mingled some local belief
with the current tradition that Ulysses' island of the shades lay in the
north, or in the west.[1180] In any case his story makes of the gloomy
land of the shades a very different region from the blissful Elysium of
the Celts and from their joyous _orbis alius_, nor is it certain that he
is referring to a Celtic people.
Traces of the idea of an underworld of the dead exist in Breton
folk-belief. The dead must travel across a subterranean ocean, and
though there is scarcely any tradition regarding what happens on
landing, M. Sébillot thinks that formerly "there existed in the
subterranean world a sort of centralisation of the different states of
the dead." If so, this must have been founded on pagan belief. The
interior of the earth is also believed to be the abode of fabulous
beings, of giants, and of fantastic animals, and there is also a
subterranean fairy world. In all this we may see a survival of the older
belief, modified by Christian teaching, since the Bretons suppose that
purgatory and hell are beneath the earth and accessible from its
surface.[1181]
Some British folk-lore brought to Greece by Demetrius and reported by
Plutarch might seem to suggest that certain persons--the mighty
dead--were privileged to pass to the island Elysium. Some islands near
Britain were called after gods and heroes, and the inhabitants of one of
these were regarded as sacrosanct by the Britons, like the priestesses
of Sena. They were visited by Demetrius, who was told that the storms
which arose during his visit were caused by the passing away of some of
the "mighty" or of the "great souls." It may have been meant that such
mighty ones passed to the more distant islands, but this is certainly
not stated. In another island, Kronos was imprisoned, watched over by
Briareus, and guarded by demons.[1182] Plutarch refers to these islands
in another work, repeating the story of Kronos, and saying that his
island is mild and fragrant, that people live there waiting on the god
who sometimes appears to them and prevents their departing. Meanwhile
they are happy and know no care, spending their time in sacrificing and
hymn-singing or in studying legends and philosophy.
Plutarch has obviously mingled Celtic Elysium beliefs with the classical
conception of the Druids.[1183] In Elysium there is no care, and
favoured mortals who pass there are generally prevented from returning
to earth. The reference to Kronos may also be based partly on myths of
Celtic gods of Elysium, partly on tales of heroes who departed to
mysterious islands or to the hollow hills where they lie asleep, but
whence they will one day return to benefit their people. So Arthur
passed to Avalon, but in other tales he and his warriors are asleep
beneath Craig-y-Ddinas, just as Fionn and his men rest within this or
that hill in the Highlands. Similar legends are told of other Celtic
heroes, and they witness to the belief that great men who had died would
return in the hour of their people's need. In time they were thought not
to have died at all, but to be merely sleeping and waiting for their
hour.[1184] The belief is based on the idea that the dead are alive in
grave or barrow, or in a spacious land below the earth, or that dead
warriors can menace their foes from the tomb.
Thus neither in old sagas, nor in _Märchen_, nor in popular tradition,
is the island Elysium a world of the dead. For the most part the pagan
eschatology has been merged in that of Christianity, while the Elysium
belief has remained intact and still survives in a whole series of
beautiful tales.
The world of the dead was in all respects a _replica_ of this world, but
it was happier. In existing Breton and Irish belief--a survival of the
older conception of the bodily state of the dead--they resume their
tools, crafts, and occupations, and they preserve their old feelings.
Hence, when they appear on earth, it is in bodily form and in their
customary dress. Like the pagan Gauls, the Breton remembers unpaid
debts, and cannot rest till they are paid, and in Brittany, Ireland, and
the Highlands the food and clothes given to the poor after a death, feed
and clothe the dead in the other world.[1185] If the world of the dead
was subterranean,--a theory supported by current folk-belief,[1186]--the
Earth-goddess or the Earth-god, who had been first the earth itself,
then a being living below its surface and causing fertility, could not
have become the divinity of the dead until the multitude of single
graves or barrows, in each of which the dead lived, had become a wide
subterranean region of the dead. This divinity was the source of life
and growth; hence he or she was regarded as the progenitor of mankind,
who had come forth from the underworld and would return there at death.
It is not impossible that the Breton conception of Ankou, death
personified, is a reminiscence of the Celtic Dispater. He watches over
all things beyond the grave, and carries off the dead to his kingdom.
But if so he has been altered for the worse by mediæval ideas of "Death
the skeleton".[1187] He is a grisly god of death, whereas the Celtic Dis
was a beneficent god of the dead who enjoyed a happy immortality. They
were not cold phantasms, but alive and endowed with corporeal form and
able to enjoy the things of a better existence, and clad in the
beautiful raiment and gaudy ornaments which were loved so much on earth.
Hence Celtic warriors did not fear death, and suicide was extremely
common, while Spanish Celts sang hymns in praise of death, and others
celebrated the birth of men with mourning, but their deaths with
joy.[1188] Lucan's words are thus the truest expression of Celtic
eschatology--"In another region the spirit animates the members; death,
if your lore be true, is but the passage to enduring life."
There is no decisive evidence pointing to any theory of moral
retribution beyond the grave among the pagan Celts. Perhaps, since the
hope of immortality made warriors face death without a tremor, it may
have been held, as many other races have believed, that cowards would
miss the bliss of the future state. Again, in some of the Irish
Christian visions of the other-world and in existing folk-belief,
certain characteristics of hell may not be derived from Christian
eschatology, e.g. the sufferings of the dead from cold.[1189] This might
point to an old belief in a cold region whither some of the dead were
banished. In the _Adventures of S. Columba's Clerics_, hell is reached
by a bridge over a glen of fire,[1190] and a narrow bridge leading to
the other world is a common feature in most mythologies. But here it may
be borrowed from Scandinavian sources, or from such Christian writings
as the _Dialogues_ of S. Gregory the Great.[1191] It might be contended
that the Christian doctrine of hell has absorbed an earlier pagan theory
of retribution, but of this there is now no trace in the sagas or in
classical references to the Celtic belief in the future life. Nor is
there any reference to a day of judgment, for the passage in which
Loegaire speaks of the dead buried with their weapons till "the day of
Erdathe," though glossed "the day of judgment of the Lord," does not
refer to such a judgment.[1192] If an ethical blindness be attributed to
the Celts for their apparent lack of any theory of retribution, it
should be remembered that we must not judge a people's ethics wholly by
their views of future punishment. Scandinavians, Greeks, and Semites up
to a certain stage were as unethical as the Celts in this respect, and
the Christian hell, as conceived by many theologians, is far from
suggesting an ethical Deity.
FOOTNOTES:
[1154] Skene, i. 370.
[1155] Cæsar, vi. 14, 19.
[1156] Diod. Sic. v, 28.
[1157] Val. Max. vi. 6. 10.
[1158] _Phars._ i. 455 f.
[1159] Amm. Marc. xv. 9; Strabo, iv. 4; Mela, iii. 2.
[1160] Miss Hull, 275.
[1161] Nutt-Meyer, i. 49; Miss Hull, 293.
[1162] Larminie, 155; Hyde, _Beside the Fire_, 21, 153; _CM_ xiii. 21;
Campbell, _WHT_, ii. 21; Le Braz{2}, i. p. xii.
[1163] Von Sacken, _Das Grabfeld von Hallstatt_; Greenwell, _British
Barrows_; _RC_ x. 234; _Antiquary_, xxxvii. 125; Blanchet, ii. 528 f.;
Anderson, _Scotland in Pagan Times_.
[1164] _L'Anthropologie_, vi. 586; Greenwell, _op. cit._ 119.
[1165] Nutt-Meyer, i. 52; O'Donovan, _Annals_, i. 145, 180; _RC_ xv. 28.
In one case the enemy disinter the body of the king of Connaught, and
rebury it face downwards, and then obtain a victory. This nearly
coincides with the dire results following the disinterment of Bran's
head (O'Donovan, i. 145; cf. p. 242, _supra_).
[1166] _LU_ 130_a_; _RC_ xxiv. 185; O'Curry, _MC_ i. p. cccxxx;
Campbell, _WHT_ iii. 62; Leahy, i. 105.
[1167] Vigfusson-Powell, _Corpus Poet. Boreale_, i. 167, 417-418, 420;
and see my _Childhood of Fiction_, 103 f.
[1168] Larminie, 31; Le Braz{2}, ii. 146, 159, 161, 184, 257 (the _rôle_
of the dead husband is usually taken by a _lutin_ or _follet_, Luzel,
_Veillées Bretons_, 79); _Rev. des Trad. Pop._ ii. 267; _Ann. de
Bretagne_, viii. 514.
[1169] Le Braz{2}, i. 313. Cf. also an incident in the _Voyage of
Maelduin_.
[1170] _RC_ x. 214f. Cf. Kennedy, 162; Le Braz{2}, i. 217, for variants.
[1171] Curtin, _Tales_, 156; see p. 170, _supra_.
[1172] Curtin, _Tales_, 156; Campbell, _Superstitions_, 241;
_Folk-Lore_, xiii. 60; Le Braz{2}, i. 213.
[1173] _Folk-Lore_, ii. 26; Yeats, _Celtic Twilight_, 166.
[1174] Tertullian, _de Anima_, 21.
[1175] Reinach, _RC_ xxii. 447.
[1176] Val. Max. vi. 6; Mela, iii. 2. 19; Plut. _Virt. mul_ 20.
[1177] See p. 229, _supra_.
[1178] Le Braz{2}, i. p. xxxix. This is only one out of many local
beliefs (cf. Sébillot, ii. 149).
[1179] Procop. _De Bello Goth._ vi. 20.
[1180] Claudian, _In Rufin._ i. 123.
[1181] Sébillot, i. 418 f.
[1182] _de Defectu Orac._ 18. An occasional name for Britain in the
_Mabinogion_ is "the island of the Mighty" (Loth, i. 69, _et passim_).
To the storm incident and the passing of the mighty, there is a curious
parallel in Fijian belief. A clap of thunder was explained as "the noise
of a spirit, we being near the place in which spirits plunge to enter
the other world, and a chief in the neighbourhood having just died"
(Williams, _Fiji_, i. 204).
[1183] _de Facie Lun[oe]_, 26.
[1184] See Hartland, _Science of Fairy Tales_, 209; Macdougall, _Folk
and Hero Tales_, 73, 263; Le Braz{2}, i. p. xxx. Mortals sometimes
penetrated to the presence of these heroes, who awoke. If the visitor
had the courage to tell them that the hour had not yet come, they fell
asleep again, and he escaped. In Brittany, rocky clefts are believed to
be the entrance to the world of the dead, like the cave of Lough Dearg.
Similar stories were probably told of these in pagan times, though they
are now adapted to Christian beliefs in purgatory or hell.
[1185] Le Braz{2}, i. p. xl, ii. 4; Curtin, 10; MacPhail, _Folk-Lore_,
vi. 170.
[1186] See p. 338, _supra_, and Logan, _Scottish Gael_, ii. 374;
_Folk-Lore,_ viii. 208, 253.
[1187] Le Braz{2}, i. 96, 127, 136f., and Intro, xlv.
[1188] Philostratus, _Apoll. of Tyana_, v. 4; Val. Max. ii. 6. 12.
[1189] Le Braz{1}, ii. 91; Curtin, _Tales_, 146. The punishment of
suffering from ice and snow appears in the _Apocalypse of Paul_ and in
later Christian accounts of hell.
[1190] _RC_ xxvi. 153.
[1191] Bk. iv. ch. 36.
[1192] _Erdathe_, according to D'Arbois, means (1) "the day in which the
dead will resume his colour," from _dath_, "colour"; (2) "the agreeable
day," from _data_, "agreeable" (D'Arbois, i. 185; cf. _Les Druides_,
135).